Hardwick, Vermont is moving to remove the Jackson Dam, hiring engineers to design the project after two consecutive years of catastrophic flooding left downtown businesses and residents underwater.
The Caledonia County Natural Resources Conservation District, a local quasi-governmental watershed agency, is seeking design services for the removal on the state's official bid portal. The work covers engineering, permitting and environmental assessment, the planning phase that typically runs one to three years before any physical removal can begin.
Hardwick, a town of about 3,000 in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, sits along the Lamoille River. Downtown flooded badly in July 2023 and again in July 2024, back-to-back events each described as once-in-a-century storms. Those floods have made river management an immediate concern for the small-business economy that Hardwick has built over the past 15 years around agriculture and local food.
Source: NationGraph.
The dam itself is a relic of Vermont's 19th-century mill economy. Like hundreds of similar structures across the state, it long outlived its industrial purpose while continuing to block fish passage, trap sediment and raise flood risk. Vermont has roughly 1,200 dams, many classified as high or significant hazard by state inspectors. Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 first forced a statewide reckoning with how aging dams and undersized waterway infrastructure can amplify flooding, a lesson Vermont has had to relearn twice more in recent summers.
Federal money has made removal increasingly viable for small communities that couldn't fund projects like this on their own. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed $2.4 billion to dam safety and removal programs across multiple federal agencies, and Vermont's own Dam Safety Program has been steering owners of derelict structures toward removal as the cheaper, federally subsidized path.
Because the Conservation District operates through a local volunteer board, the Jackson Dam project carries a community-driven character. Whether the design process surfaces unexpected obstacles, permitting complications, cost estimates or competing priorities will shape whether removal actually happens and on what timeline.
